| The poet C.P. Cavafy, was born in Alexandria, Egypt (1863). His parents were Greek, and he wrote his poetry in Greek, but he lived in Alexandria almost his entire life. In 1889, he got a job as an unpaid clerk at the city's Irrigation Office, and he stayed there until he retired thirty years later. He lived with his mother until he was thirty-six, in an apartment just above a brothel, and across the street from a church and a hospital. Cavafy once said, "Where could I live better? Below, the brothel caters to the flesh. And there is the church which forgives sin. And there is the hospital where we die."
He published only a few poems in his lifetime; most of his poetry was printed in pamphlets that he gave to friends and family. He wrote poetry on all kinds of subjects, but he's especially known for his erotic poems, which were unusually direct and detailed for their day. Cavafy wrote, in the poem "An Old Man": In the inner room of the noisy caf� an old man sits bent over a table; a newspaper before him, no companion beside him. and in the scorn of his miserable old age, he meditates how little he enjoyed the years when he had strength, the art of the word, and good looks. He knows he has aged much; he is aware of it, he sees it, and yet the time when he was young seems like yesterday. How short a time, how short a time. And he ponders how Wisdom had deceived him; and how he always trusted her--what folly!-- the liar who would say, "Tomorrow. You have ample time." He recalls impulses he curbed; and how much joy he sacrificed. Every lost chance now mocks his senseless prudence. . . . But with so much thinking and remembering the old man reels. And he dozes off bent over the table of the caf�. |
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| Cavafy: The Movie |
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| Cavafy's Poems |